Raheel Sharif

Raheel Sharif (16 June 1956-) was the Chief of the Army Staff of Pakistan from 2013, succeeding Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Biography
Raheel Sharif was born on 16 June 1956 in Quetta, Baluchistan, Pakistan to a Jat Sunni Muslim family. His older brother Major Shabbir Sharif was killed in the Okara District of Punjab during the Bangladesh Liberation War in combat with India in 1971, and Raheel graduated from the Pakistan Military Academy in 1976. He joined the Frontier Force Regiment and later transferred to a military division, and Sharif was made Inspector General for Training and Evaluation under Pervez Musharraf. He changed the army's focus towards carrying out counter-terrorism operations against the Taliban rebels of the North-West Frontier Provinces (NWFP) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He convinced his officers that the Taliban were as much of a threat as India, but he also said that all threats had to be dealt with accordingly.

On 27 November 2013, Sharif was appointed as the new Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistani Army by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, as General Raheel Sharif was uninterested in politics. He took command in a time of increased warfare with the Taliban, who were also overrunning Afghanistan as United States and their allied forces withdrew. Sharif began offensives in October 2014 that killed several rebels, stepping up air force bombings of Taliban strongholds. Sharif also took command of Pakistani forces dealing with clashes along the border with India in Kashmir, a long-disputed mountainous province in the north.